Back in the early days of vanilla we used to communicate (and collude) with the opposite faction by bypassing the language barrier with creative use of symbols and other characters. This led to some very interesting in-game interactions and events, as well as drama within the same faction as you could potentially create agreements with the opposite faction that could shut out members of your own.

While controversial, this IS vanilla, and was a lot of fun. Here's an example of how it would go:

|-| 3 `/ \/\/ |-| /-\ -|- $ |_| |D (hey what's up)

Anyway, with the client changes throughout the years, and possibly even later in vanilla, this was probably changed. I didn't play the later vanilla patches, unfortunately, so I don't know. Does anyone if this was patched out during vanilla? What's your thoughts on having it back for Classic?

Actually, would be an amazing hack or addon, which converts your writing to random nonsense, which then would look as normal sentence to the opposing faction. I wonder if we know anything about the algorithm that is being used or if there's such thing at all.

Emotes are always useful, /rude'ing at Horde was always a favourite pastime of mine. I mostly played on a PvE server so a lot of interactions out in the wild were fairly calm so communication might work there, but I imagine on a PvP server the communication might be less useful.

I think it was a cool phase in Vanilla but at least on my server there was 3 TS servers with hundreds of slots were people meet for PvP skirmishes or helpeing each other out (was a PvP Server) and even timed the World bosses so there was no fighting over this.

Today people will start a Discord server per Realm and they will communicate on them.

I ran an IRC channel in early 2005 for this purpose on Illidan. That came several months into vanilla, but it still didn't really replace the ability this gave you to immediately communicate with players of the opposite faction, if they happened to decide not to try to kill you immediately.

Anyway, with the client changes throughout the years, and possibly even later in vanilla, this was probably changed. I didn't play the later vanilla patches, unfortunately, so I don't know. Does anyone if this was patched out during vanilla? What's your thoughts on having it back for Classic?

Cross-faction communication and collusion are a given. We know there will be battlenet integration and with streamers connecting wider audiences and discord servers connecting players by server etc, we will constantly be in communication with the opposing faction. Can you avoid this? Absolutely, just dont participate. The wider group of players will be actively connecting with one another all the time. I know that in retail vanilla, we regularly chatted in teamspeak with players of the opposite faction that we pvp'd against so it wont be new, however it will be a lot more frequent due to accessibility. I think this evolution was/is inevitable but the difference will be that the benefits of colluding have been highlighted on private servers and will incentivize top tier players to interact.

Am I happy about it? No. Will I do it if it benefits me, absolutely. Will I have two accounts in Classic like most of my friends? Of course. I will spend time connecting with the opposing faction ingame and out of game because it will give me an edge.

Anyway, with the client changes throughout the years, and possibly even later in vanilla, this was probably changed. I didn't play the later vanilla patches, unfortunately, so I don't know. Does anyone if this was patched out during vanilla? What's your thoughts on having it back for Classic?